‌Photographer and critic Tim Maul emerged from the 1970’s when an absence of a dominant art movement allowed for a permissive attitude toward media among younger artists. In the upwardly mobile 80’s photography was revived by ‘Picture Generation’ post-modernists; artists who worked with cameras but swore no allegiance to photography. Influenced by performance, video, conceptual and narrative tendencies, Maul produced images outside fine art photography’s confines, addressing his fascination with orientation, biography, and tangential impulse. Tim Maul lives in New York City. He is a member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, contributes criticism to numerous publications, including Art in America, Flash Art and Afterimage, and exhibits through Leslie Tonkonow Artworks & Projects (New York) and Camera Artists (Paris). Maul has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Tues. January 2910:00 AM

Carlo McCormick is a leading NY art critic and curator. He has written numerous books, monographs, and catalogues and has lectured and taught extensively at universities and colleges around the country. His publications have appeared in such publications as Aperture, Art in America, Art News, Artforum, Camera Austria, High Times, Spin, Tokion, Vice and was the Senior Editor of PAPER magazine. He has curated shows for the Bronx Museum of Art, New York University, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Woodstock Center for Photography. He was also co-author for the collaborative book Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art which features graffiti and urban art from four generations of famous visionary outlaws.

Tues. February 5 10:00 AM

Saya Woolfalk (b. Japan, 1979) is a New York artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions (sculpture, installation, painting, performance and video). She has exhibited at MoMA PS1; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville; Momenta Art; and Performa 09; and has been written about in Sculpture Magazine and on Art21’s blog. With funding from the NEA, her solo exhibition, The Institute of Empathy, ran at Real Art Ways from Fall 2010 to Spring 2011. Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in Fall of 2012. Some of her upcoming projects are a solo show for Third Streaming as well as inclusion in group exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the MCA San Diego. She will be an artist in residence at the Simon Center for Physics and Geometry at SUNY Stonybrook in the Spring of 2013. (www.sayawoolfalk.com)

Tues. February 26 10:00 AM

Steve DeBenedetto was born in the Bronx and raised in suburban NY in the 60s and 70s, a time period that continues to inform his work. The work can be tangled, roiling, gnarly, encrusted visionary paintings that are sometimes hopefuly and sometimes paranoid collisions of id and ego; psychic battle zones where marks and meaning accumulate. DeBenedetto is represented by the David Nolan Gallery (NYC). He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Rutgers. He has shown his work since 1984 in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Steve DeBenedetto was given the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. This talk will trace the origin and significance of recurring imagery in his paintings since the mid-90s, such as helicopters, octopi and ferris wheels. He will also discuss more recent preoccupations such as the movie Easy Rider and problematic quasi sculptural architecture and its relationship to the evolution of language. Thematic notions such as these will be discussed in relation to the need for formal corruption and freedom through failure in painting, as well as an utter disregard for the distinction between abstraction and representation. (www.davidnolangallery.com/artists/steve-dibenedetto)

Tues. March 267:00 PM

Jewel Tones - Artists panel with Matthew Nichols, visiting critic MFA program MSU:Jewel Tones will examine the work of three contemporary artists: Arch Connelly, John Torreano, and Kirsten Hassenfeld. While their practices are varied, they all utilize gemstones as a medium or motif. By incorporating fake jewels into their works, or fashioning surrogates from other materials, these artists explore a range of formal and perceptual issues, evoke natural phenomena, and interrogate cultural signifiers of glamour, luxury, and value.

Ann Hamilton, Installation & Performance Artist. Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her liminal environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. Hamilton has received a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, the Heinz Award, and was chosen to represent the United States at the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 1992, she established her home and practice in Columbus, Ohio. She is currently a Distinguished University Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.www.annhamiltonstudio.com

Tues. May 7 10:00 AM

Anke Becker is a draftswoman and a collage-artist who was born in and lives in Germany. She works with colored pencils, newspapers, magazines, words, scissors, and with other people’s drawings. Her aim is to find new and unexpected relationships between things, patterns, words and numbers. Since 2006 she has collaborated with other artists creating large collaborative drawing installations. Anke Becker initiated the exhibition-project Anonymous Drawings with an international open call to participates. She will discuss her project Anonymous Drawings in her lecture as well as discuss the importance of artistic collaborations. (www.anke-becker.de/en)

For further information contact MSU’s MFA office at 973-655-4074, or the Montclair Art Museum at 973-746-5555.